Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

The Conspiracy Meme

Many
of these theories are clearly absurd, but some are plausible and others
actually contain elements of truth.

Conspiracy
theories are easy to propagate and difficult to refute. Having long
flourished in politics and religion, they have also spread into science
and medicine. It is useful to think of conspiracy theorizing as a meme,
a cultural invention that passes from one mind to another and thrives,
or declines, through a process analogous to genetic selection (Dawkins
1976). The conspiracy meme competes with other rhetorical memes, such
as the fair debate meme, the scientific expertise meme, and the resistance
to orthodoxy meme.

The
central logic of the conspiracy meme is to question, often on speculative
grounds, everything the “establishment” says or does and to
demand immediate, comprehensive, and convincing answers to all questions.
Unconvincing answers are taken as proof of conspiratorial deception.
A good example is the film Loose
Change 9/11:
An American Coup (Avery
2009), which started out as a short fictional
2005 video about the World Trade Center attacks that was marketed as
if it were a truth-seeking documentary. The 2005 video went viral on
the Internet and has been viewed by over ten million people. Loose Change raises
a long series of questions illustrated by tendentious information, such
as the fact that the fires in the World Trade Center were not hot enough
to melt steel. But no one had claimed that the steel had melted, only
that it had gotten hot enough to weaken and collapse, which it did.
The video presents the fact that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
is keeping certain people's tax returns secret, set to an ominous
musical background suggestive of evildoing-despite the well-known
fact that the IRS keeps everyone's tax returns secret.

When
an alleged fact is debunked, the conspiracy meme often just replaces
it with another fact. One of the producers of Loose Change,
Korey Rowe, stated, “We don't ever come out and say that everything
we say is 100 percent [correct]. We know there are errors in the documentary,
and we've actually left them in there so that people [will] discredit
us and do the research for themselves” (Slensky 2006).

When
the conspiracy meme is reinforced by a regular diet of “alternative”
videos and one-sided literature, it can become a habitual way of thinking.
People who believe in one conspiracy are more likely to believe in others
(Goertzel 1994; Kramer 1998). A young self-declared conspiracy theorist
challenged me to debate one conspiracy theory per week with him, including
theories about genetically modified (GM) foods, vaccine neurotoxins,
AIDS, and September 11, 2001. He expressed his “true belief” that
there is a “kernel of truth” in almost every conspiracy theory and
claimed that once you understand the kernel, all you have to do is “connect
the dots to make a picture.”

Conspiracy
theorists have connected a lot of dots. The ninety-two conspiracy theories
described in a recent handbook (McConnachie and Tudge 2008) range in
topic from Tutankhamen and the curse of the pharaoh, the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, and satanic ritual
abuse to the alleged scheming of the Council on Foreign Relations, the
Trilateral Commission, and the British royal family. Other theories
involve religious cults, alien abductions, or terrorist plots. Some
are merely amusing, but others have fueled wars, inquisitions, and genocides
in which millions of people died.

Scientific
and technological conspiracies often allege the misuse of science by
government, the military, or large corporations, and they include bizarre
claims that the military suppressed technology that could make warships
invisible, automobile or oil companies possess hidden technology that
can turn water into gasoline, and the military is secretly in cahoots
with space aliens. Conspiracy theorists have argued that the AIDS virus
was deliberately created as part of a plot to kill black or gay people,
the 1969 Moon landing was staged in a movie studio, and dentists seek
to poison Americans by fluoridating public water supplies. Other theorists
claim that corporate officers and public health officials suppress evidence
that preservatives in vaccines cause autism and silicone breast implants
cause connective-tissue disease (Specter 2009; Wallace 2009).

Conspiracy
theories include claims that a major drug company hid reports stating
that its leading anti-inflammatory drug caused heart attacks and strokes
(Specter 2009) and that environmental scientists have conspired to keep
refereed journals from publishing papers by researchers skeptical that
global warming is a crisis (Hayward 2009; Revkin 2009). There are many
theories about physicians or drug companies conspiring to suppress non-mainstream
medical treatments, vitamins, and health foods. One author alleges
that big business and the medical establishment conspired to obstruct
the search for a cure for AIDS so that they could sell their ineffective
drugs and treatments (Nussbaum 1990).

Many
of these theories are clearly absurd, but some are plausible and others
actually contain elements of truth. How can we distinguish among the
amusing eccentrics, the honestly misguided, the avaricious litigants,
and the serious skeptics questioning a premature consensus? With scientific
claims, the only definitive answer is to reexamine the original research
data and repeat the experiments and analysis. But no one has the time
or the expertise to examine the original research literature on every
topic, let alone repeat the research. As such, it is important to have
some guidelines for deciding which theories are plausible enough to
merit serious examination.

One
valuable guideline is to look for cascade logic in conspiracy arguments
(Susstein and Vermeule 2008). This occurs when defenders of a conspiracy
theory find it necessary to implicate more and more people whose failure
to discover or reveal the conspiracy can be explained only by their
alleged complicity. Another guideline is to look for exaggerated claims
about the power of the conspirators, claims that are needed to explain
how they were able to intimidate so many people and cover their tracks
so well. The more vast and powerful the alleged conspiracy, the less
likely that it could have remained undiscovered.

For example, the claim that the Moon landing in 1969 was a hoax implies
the complicity of thousands of American scientists and technicians,
as well as that of Soviet astronomers and others around the world who
tracked the event. It is incredibly implausible that such a conspiracy
could have held together. On the other hand, the theory that a few individuals
in Richard Nixon's campaign conspired to break into their opponents'
offices in the Watergate building was plausible and proved worth investigating.
Similarly, the theory that a group of climate scientists conspired to
suppress research that they believed to be misleading and harmful to
public policy is plausible and worth investigating, despite the small
likelihood that such a conspiracy would remain undetected for long.

Definition of ‘Conspiracy'

The conspiracy
meme works because conspiracies do exist in the real world. Claims of
conspiracy cannot be reflexively dismissed, but they are difficult to
test because lack of evidence can be interpreted as proof of how cleverly
the conspirators have hidden it. The first step in testing claims of
conspiracy is to establish precisely what is being claimed. There is
no single accepted definition of “conspiracy,” and people apply
the term differently depending on their point of view. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a conspiracy quite loosely
as “an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal,
illegal, or reprehensible.” There are legal definitions of criminal
conspiracy, but whether something is “reprehensible” is in the eye
of the beholder. When Hillary Clinton protested that her husband
was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” and Lyndon Johnson
accused the media and liberal activists of a “conspiracy” to oppose
his Vietnam War policies, these claimants were intentionally vague as
to whether they referred to illegal or merely reprehensible behavior
(Kramer and Gavrieli 2005). Any group of people organizing for a cause
the speaker does not like may be denounced as “conspirators.”

But
the word conspiracy also usually implies something that
is secret and hidden. Pigden (2006, 20) defines a conspiracy as “a
secret plan on the part of a group to influence events in part by covert
action.” Conspiracies so defined certainly do take place, and it may
be that the most successful ones are never discovered. They include
the (failed) conspiracy to assassinate Adolph Hitler; the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and the Watergate conspiracy. But the term
“conspiracy theory” usually refers to claims that important events
have been caused by conspiracies that have heretofore remained undiscovered
(Coady 2006). The claim that the World Trade Center was bombed by al-Qaeda
would not be a conspiracy theory in this sense, but the claim that it
was bombed by Israeli agents or that American authorities knew about
it in advance would be. There is no chance of getting agreement on an
“official” definition, but people alleging conspiracy should be
challenged to be clear about their meaning.

The
conspiracy meme flourishes best in politics, religion, and journalism,
where practitioners can succeed by attracting followers from the general
public. It isn't essential that practitioners actually believe the
theory; they may just find it plausible and useful to raise doubts and
discredit their competitors. But this strategy should not be enough
for scientists. Scientific findings are just that-findings, not speculations
about undiscovered goings-on. These findings must be replicable by other
scientists.

In
their routine work, scientists have little use for the conspiracy meme
because success in scientific careers comes from winning grant applications
and publishing significant findings in peer-reviewed journals. Attacking
other scientists as conspirators would not be helpful for most scientists'
careers, however frustrated they may be with referees, editors, colleagues,
or administrators who turn down their manuscripts or grant proposals
or deny them tenured jobs. But the conspiracy meme may be useful for
scientists who are so far out of the mainstream in their field that
they seek to appeal to alternative funding sources or publication outlets.
The conspiracy meme also occasionally surfaces when a scientist's
mental health deteriorates to the point that he or she loses touch with
reality.

Trial
lawyers, on the other hand, have a great deal of use for the conspiracy
meme because they succeed by convincing juries. It is part of the standard
repertoire of memes they use to discredit evidence offered by “experts”
of all kinds, including scientists. Lawyers focus on the motivations
of the experts, on who hired them, on what they are being paid for their
testimony, and so on. They also seek out an “expert” who will testify
on their side, implying that expertise is for sale to the highest bidder
and that opinion is divided on the issue in question. The rewards can
be very great if a class-action lawsuit results in a settlement against
a wealthy corporation.

Vaccine Conspiracies

Conspiracy
theories about vaccines were given a tremendous boost when the esteemed
medical journal the
Lancet published a study
reporting a hypothesized link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR)
vaccine and autism (Burgess et al. 2006). The media highlighted the
story despite the study's very small sample size and speculative causal
inferences, and the public reaction was much larger than medical and
public health authorities anticipated. Reasons for the public reaction
included resentment of pressure on parents, distrust of medical authorities,
and the potentially catastrophic nature of possible risk to a vulnerable
population. There was also the potential for large class-action settlements
in favor of parents who believed their children were injured by the
vaccines, some of whom desperately needed help to care for autistic
children.

The
result was a decline in the proportion of parents having their children
vaccinated and a subsequent increase in disease, especially in the United
Kingdom. The authorities responded by citing findings from large epidemiologic
studies, but much of the press coverage highlighted anecdotal accounts
and human-interest stories. Recovery of public confidence in vaccination
may be due more to revelations of conflicts of interest on the part
of the physician who published the original article-which was eventually
withdrawn by the journal-than to the overwhelming evidence for the
lack of a relationship between vaccination and autism rates.

Conspiracy
theorists typically overlook lapses in logic and evidence by their supporters,
but they are quick to pounce on any flaw on the part of their opponents.
When a leading Danish vaccine researcher was accused of stealing funds
from his university, the vaccine conspiracy theorists pounced. Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr., son of a former U.S. Attorney General, used the occasion
to denounce the “vaccine cover-up” on the influential blog Huffington Post (Kennedy 2010). He explained away
the research findings on vaccines and autism on the grounds that there
had been a change in the Danish law and the opening of a new autism
clinic. He criticized vaccine researchers for receiving money from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their studies and
for “being in cahoots with CDC officials intent on fraudulently cherry-picking
facts to prove vaccine safety.” But if the CDC had not funded this
research, largely in response to popular concerns, vaccine opponents
would have denounced it for not doing so.

Genetically Modified Food
Conspiracies

Public alarm
about GM foods was aroused when a scientist, Árpád Pusztai, claimed
in a television interview that rats had suffered intestinal damage due
to eating GM potatoes (“Genetically modified” 2010; Enserink 1999).
The finding was clearly preliminary; there were only six rats in each
of two groups, and one group was fed GM potatoes
for only ten days. The reported effects on the rats were minor, but
the study received tremendous publicity because
it fed into fears that had long been cultivated by environmentalist
and anti-
capitalist social movements. As the controversy progressed,
questions were raised about the integrity of the study, leading Pusztai
to leave his research institute. But anti-GM activists denounced criticisms
of the research as a conspiracy and circulated a petition among scientists
supporting Pusztai's rights. Finally, the
Lancet published his study,
which had not yet appeared in a refereed journal. They sent it to six
reviewers, only one of whom opposed publication. But one of the reviewers
who favored publication said he “deemed the study flawed but favored
publication to avoid suspicions of a conspiracy against Pusztai and
to give colleagues a chance to see the data for themselves” (Enserink
1999).

By
releasing his findings on television, Pusztai received extraordinary
attention for a study that otherwise might never have been accepted
by a leading scientific journal. At least, that was the opinion of the
editor of a competing journal who asked “when was the last time [the Lancet]
published a rat study that was uninterpretable? This is really lowering
the bar” (Enserink 1999). Releasing controversial findings on the
Internet or through press releases is justified as a way of making important
discoveries available quickly, but it also serves to circumvent the
normal scientific review process. Sometimes these “findings,”
such as the claim that the decline in crime in the United States in
the 1990s was due to the legalization of abortion in the 1970s, become
part of the conventional wisdom before other scientists have a chance
to debunk them (Zimring 2006).

The Fair Debate Meme

Dissenters
from mainstream science often invoke the meme that there are two sides
to every question and each side is entitled to equal time to present
its case. George W. Bush famously suggested that students be taught
both evolution and creationism so that they can judge which has the
most convincing argument. Similarly, holocaust deniers demand equal
time for their side of the argument, and they might travel to Tehran
or wherever they can find a receptive audience. If these dissenters,
or “revisionists,” succeed in getting an opportunity to present
their case, they will hammer away at any gaps or contradictions in the
evidence presented by mainstream researchers, using rhetoric that questions
their opponents' motivations while avoiding any hint of weakness or
bias in their own case.

This
advocacy meme is widely used in law courts and political debates, and
it can work well when the question at hand is one of taste or morality.
It doesn't work well for scientists because there are objectively
right and wrong answers to most scientific questions-they can't
be resolved by votes of schoolchildren. Schoolchildren in 1945 might
have agreed with U.S. Admiral William Leahy's famous statement that
“the [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert on
explosives.” But once the bomb went off, there were no longer two
sides to the question.

The Scientific Expertise
Meme

In deciding
to pursue the atomic bomb project, President Harry Truman relied on
another meme that is very powerful in western societies, that of reliance
on scientific expertise. Decision makers and the general public are
most likely to be persuaded by this meme when scientists are in agreement
and when their advice and policy prescriptions have a good track record.
There is an inherent tension between the policy makers' desire for
consensus and the scientists' need to remain open to alternative theories
and evidence. Scientists who wish to influence policy may be tempted
to claim a scientific consensus when the facts do not yet warrant one.

We
social scientists have forfeited much of our potential influence because
we are too often perceived as advocates for a cause rather than as objective
researchers. Our ability to predict policy outcomes is very limited,
yet we sometimes fall into the trap of claiming to know more than we
do. Econometricians have been publishing conflicting analyses of the
relationship between capital punishment and homicide rates for decades
without making any real progress, yet they continue to use their findings
to advocate for or against capital punishment (Goertzel and Goertzel
2008). When President Bill Clinton proposed welfare reform in the United
States, social scientists specializing in the topic almost universally
predicted that a disastrous increase in poverty and hunger would result.
In some cases they defended their predictions with elaborate statistical
models, despite the fact that these models had no demonstrated track
record for predicting trends in poverty (Goertzel 1998). President Clinton
deferred to politicians and conservative activists who predicted that
poverty and dependency would decline as, in fact, they did.

Memes Collide: HIV/AIDS
Deniers

The conflict
between the fair debate meme and the scientific expertise meme was pronounced
in the dispute between the late Nature editor John Maddox and biologist Peter
Duesberg, who opposes the theory that HIV causes AIDS. Relying on the
norms of fairness in debate, Duesberg (1995) sought the right to reply
to scientific papers that defend mainstream views about the HIV-AIDS
connection. At a certain point in the debate, Maddox refused to continue
to give Duesberg “the right of reply,” arguing that Duesberg had
“forfeited the right to expect answers by his rhetorical technique.
Questions left unanswered for more than about ten minutes he takes as
further proof that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Evidence that contradicts
his alternative drug hypothesis on the other hand is brushed aside.”
Maddox argued that Duesberg was not asking legitimate scientific questions
but rather making demands and implying, “Unless you can answer this,
and right now, your belief that HIV causes AIDS is wrong” (Maddox
1993).

Maddox
observed that “Duesberg will not be alone in protesting that this
is merely a recipe for suppressing challenges to received wisdom. So
it can be. But Nature will not so use it. Instead, what
Duesberg continues to say about the causation of AIDS will be reported
in the general interest. When he offers a text for publication that
can be authenticated, it will if possible be published.” As an editor
of a scientific journal, Maddox was justified in saying that he would
publish papers that offered new findings, not ones that just picked
at unanswered questions in other people's work. But Maddox was realistic
in realizing that his refusal to publish additional comments by Duesberg
would be portrayed as censorship by believers in the AIDS conspiracy
theory.

The Resistance to Orthodoxy
Meme

Duesberg and
other dissenters also rely on another well-established rhetorical meme,
that of the courageous independent scientist resisting orthodoxy. This
meme is frequently introduced with the example of Galileo's defense
of the heliocentric model of the solar system against the orthodoxy
of the Catholic Church. And there are other cases of dissenting scientists
who have later been proven right. Thomas Gold (1989) reports confronting
the “herd mentality” of science when advancing his theories on the
mechanisms of the inner ear and the nature of pulsars as rotating neutron
stars, both of which later came to be accepted. This “herd mentality”
is not the product of a deliberate conspiracy, although it may be perceived
as one. It is a collective behavior phenomenon: a belief is reinforced
and becomes part of the conventional wisdom because it is repeated so
often. This is why those who offer differing views are important. Being
a dissenter from orthodoxy isn't so difficult; the hard part is actually
having a better theory than the conventional one. Dissenting theories
should be published if they are backed by plausible evidence, but this
does not mean giving critics “equal time” to dissent from every
finding by a mainstream scientist.

In
his response to Duesberg, Maddox refers to the philosophical argument,
associated with Karl Popper, that science progresses through falsification
of hypotheses. Maddox says, “True, good theories (pace Popper) are falsifiable theories,
and a single falsification will bring a good theory crashing down.”
But he goes on in the next sentence to implicitly rely on a different
philosophy of science, often associated with the work of Imre Lakatos,
which is that science normally progresses by correcting and adding to
ongoing research programs, not by abandoning them every time a hypothesis
fails. Maddox says, “Unanswered questions are not falsifications;
rather, they should be the stimulants of further research.”

Scientists
do change their ideas in response to new evidence, perhaps more often
than people in most walks of life. Linus Pauling abandoned his triple-helix
model of DNA as soon as he saw the evidence for the double-helix model.
But he never abandoned his advocacy of vitamin C as a treatment for
the common cold and cancer, no matter how many studies failed to show
a significant difference between experimental and control groups. Pauling
found flaws in each study's research design and insisted that the
results would be different if only the study were done differently.
He never did any empirical research on vitamin C himself, research that
would have risked failing to confirm his hypotheses. He instead limited
himself to debunking published scientific studies. Unfortunately, Pauling
is probably better known by the general public for this work than for
his undisputed and fundamental contributions to chemistry. Pauling did
not claim that he was the victim of a conspiracy; he saw himself as
challenging the herd mentality of science. But his scientific prestige
lent credibility to those who sought to discredit scientific medicine
as a conspiracy of doctors and drug companies (Goertzel and Goertzel
1995). Scientific expertise is usually quite specialized, and scientists
who advocate for political causes only tangentially related to their
area of specialization have no special claim on the truth.

Conspiracy
theorists often seem to believe that they can prove a scientific theory
wrong by finding even a minor flaw or gap in the evidence for it. Then
they claim conspiracy when scientists endeavor to fix the flaw or fill
the gap. If the scientists persist in their work, on the assumption
that a solution will be found, they are again charged with conspiracy.
In fact, the occasions when an entire scientific theory is overthrown
by a negative finding are few and far between. This is especially true
in fields depending on statistical modeling of complex phenomena for
which there are often multiple models that are roughly equally good
(or bad), and the choice of a data set and decisions about data-set
filtering are often critical. The more important test of a research
program is whether progress is being made over a period of time and
whether better progress could be made with an alternative approach.
Progress can be measured by the accumulation of a solid, verifiable
body of knowledge with a very high probability of being correct (Franklin
2009).

Climate Change Conspiracy

The conspiracy
meme has been especially prominent in the debate about global warming.
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its
report in 1996, an eminent retired physicist, Frederick Seitz (1996),
accused it of a “major deception on global warming” on the op-ed
pages of the Wall
Street Journal. Seitz
did not offer a scientific argument that the report's conclusions
were wrong. Instead, he attacked the committee's procedure in editing
its document, accusing the editors of violating their own rules by rewording
and rearranging parts of the text to obscure the views of skeptical
scientists. This seemingly obscure point about the editing of a UN technical
document proved remarkably effective in providing a rallying point for
opponents of the report's conclusions.

A
careful review of the incident (Lahsen 1999) concluded that the editors
did not violate any of their own rules and that the editorial changes
were reasonable. Editors, after all, do edit texts, all the more so
when the texts are written by a committee. The skeptical arguments were
not deleted from the report, but they were repositioned and rephrased,
perhaps giving them less emphasis than Seitz thought they deserved.
But the conspiracy meme was successful in shifting much of the public
debate from the substance of the issue to criticism of personalities,
procedures, and motivations. The climate scientists felt attacked and
apparently began to think of themselves more as activists under siege
than as neutral scientists. In 2009, computer hackers released private
e-mails apparently showing that some climate scientists had pressured
editors not to publish papers by skeptics and that the climate scientists
had looked for ways to present their data to reinforce their advocacy
views (Revkin 2009; Hayward 2009; Broder 2010).

Climate
science is heavily dependent on complex statistical models based on
limited data, so it is not surprising that models based on different
assumptions give differing results (Schmidt and Amman 2005). In presenting
their data, some scientists were too quick to smooth trends into a “hockey
stick” model that fit with their advocacy concerns. Several different
groups of well-qualified specialists have now been over the data carefully,
and the result is a less linear “hockey stick,” with a rise in temperature
during a medieval warm period and a drop during a little ice age. But
the sharp increase in warming in the twentieth century, which is the
main point of the analysis, is still there (“Hockey stick controversy”
2010; Brumfiel 2006).

This
is not the place to review the substance of the issue, which has already
been debated extensively in this journal. An encouraging thing, however,
is that despite the bitterness is the debate about scientists' behavior,
there is considerable consensus on the issue of global warming itself.
One of the responsible critics, for example, frankly states that “climate
change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major
consequences in the future” (Hayward 2009). But there is no consensus
on how high the risk is, how quickly it is likely to materialize, or
the costs and benefits of strategies needed to counter it.

The
less responsible critics simply dismiss the issue as a hoax and focus
exclusively on the peccadilloes of the other side. The climate scientists
gave the conspiracy theorists an opening by letting their advocacy color
their science, which compromised the legitimacy of their enterprise
and, ironically, weakened the political movement itself. This is especially
unfortunate because the underlying science is fundamentally correct.

Conspiracy Consequences

Faced with
assaults on their professional credibility, scientists may be tempted
to retreat from the world of public policy. But allowing the conspiracy
theorists to dominate the public debate can have tragic consequences.
Fear of science and belief in conspiracies has led British parents to
expose their children to life-threatening diseases, the South African
health department to reject retroviral treatment for AIDS, and the Zambian
government to refuse GM food from the United States in the midst of
a famine. Fear of science is not new. Benjamin Franklin was afraid to
vaccinate his family against smallpox and regretted it deeply when a
son died of the disease in 1736. Parents are making the same mistake
today.

Advocacy
groups sometimes find it easier to arouse fears of science than to advocate
for other goals that may actually be more fundamental to their concerns.
The movement against GM foodstuffs in Europe was mobilized largely by
anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, and anti-American activists who found
it more effective than attacking corporate capitalism directly (Purdue
2000; Schurman 2004). These ideologies have much less support in North
America, and efforts to organize against GM food here were much weaker.
North Americans have suffered no significant ill effects from the integration
of these foods into their diet, a fact that Greenpeace and other advocacy
groups studiously ignore. One suspects that if GM seeds had been invented
by a socialist government, these advocacy groups would have heralded
them as a great victory in the war against hunger.

Public
policy requires reaching consensus to make decisions, even though some
uncertainty usually remains. If scientists cannot do this, surely it
is too much to expect politicians or journalists to do it. Efforts to
define a consensus are vulnerable to attacks by conspiracy theorists
who portray a consensus as a mechanism for suppressing dissent and debate.
But there will always be dissenters, and at a certain point arguing
with them becomes unproductive. In 1870, Alfred Russell Wallace allowed
himself to be drawn into an extended conflict with Flat Earth theorist
John Hampden, editor of the Truth-Seeker's
Oracle and Scriptural Science Review.
Their dispute over whether the Earth is round involved measuring the
curvature of the water on the Old Bedford Canal in England. There was
a public wager, which Wallace won, followed by a lawsuit when Hampden
refused to pay, a threat against Wallace's life, and a prison term
for Hampden. Hampden and his followers were never convinced the Earth
is not flat, and belief in the “round Earth conspiracy” apparently
persists to this day (Garwood 2008; O'Neill 2008).

Scientists
will never reach a consensus with Flat Earthers or with those who believe
the Earth was created in 4004 bce. Nor do they need to. The best that
science can provide is a clearly specified degree of consensus among
scientists who base their conclusions on empirical data. Efforts to
reach consensus on important questions have been discouraged due to
the influence of philosophers of science who emphasize conflicting research
programs, paradigm shifts, and scientific revolutions (Franklin 2009;
Stove 1982). Although these events do occur in the history of science,
they are exceptional. Most sciences, most of the time, progress with
an orderly, gradual accumulation of knowledge that is recognized and
accepted by specialists in the field. Opposition rooted in religious
or ideological concerns is acceptable as part of the democratic political
process, but it need not prevent scientists from reaching a consensus
when one is justified.

Peer Review

The peer review
process in scientific journals plays a central role in determining which
research findings deserve to be incorporated in the scientific consensus
on an issue. As such, this process is a target for conspiracy theorists.
Peer reviewers are usually anonymous, which suggests they may have something
to hide. Although authors' names are usually removed from studies
to be reviewed, reviewers are specialists in the same field and can
often guess who the authors are. Reviewers are not in a good position
to detect actual fraud; they can't redo the experiments or the data
analysis. And they may reject papers that go against the conventional
wisdom or political consensus in their field (Franklin 2009, 205–11).
No adequate alternative to peer review has been proposed, but initiatives
to make the review process more transparent may help, including making
reviewers' comments and the original data sets available on the Internet.

The
credibility of peer review has been undermined in the recent dispute
over global warming because the reviewers are drawn from a fairly small
pool of specialists who are known to have a policy agenda. The appointment
of panels of distinguished scientists to review the body of research
in the field is an excellent step to rebuilding credibility (Broder
2010). The review panels must have full access to all the data sets,
as well as the time and expertise to conduct their own analyses if necessary-which
cannot normally be expected of volunteer reviewers for a journal. It
is important that these reviewers give qualified specialists an opportunity
to present alternative views, as long as these views are based on scientific
analysis of appropriate data and not just polemical criticism. No matter
how well they do their work, however, these panels are likely to be
attacked by conspiracy theorists.

If
the blue-ribbon scientific commissions confirm the original research
findings, perhaps with only modest caveats, many people will be convinced.
But individuals with strong feelings about the issue may resort to cascade
logic, suspecting that the review panel is also part of the conspiracy.
Cascade logic can easily develop into a generalized distrust of anything
that comes from a mainstream or elite source. In the past, social psychological
studies found that this kind of generalized belief in conspiracies was
most common among people who were discontented with the established
institutions and elite groups in their society, believed that conditions
were worsening for people like themselves, and believed that authorities
did not care about them (Goertzel 1994; Kramer 1998).

The conspiracy meme can convert a dry scientific issue into a human
drama in which malefactors can be exposed and denounced. Scientists
are not trained in dealing with this kind of debate, and there is no
reason to expect them to be especially good at it. If they also have
strong feelings about the issues, they may fall into the conspiracy
meme themselves. But when scientists succumb to the temptation to “fight
fire with fire,” they risk losing their credibility as experts. It
may be tempting to exaggerate findings in mass media outlets by using
graphics that highlight the most extreme possibilities. This may be
effective in the short run, but the public feels deceived when today's
newest scare is refuted by tomorrow's press release; their belief
in science is diminished. In today's political climate, scientists
need to be careful about releasing their findings on controversial issues;
they must make sure the findings have been thoroughly reviewed and that
the data sets are available for others to analyze.

Political
decisions will inevitably reflect economic interests and emotional concerns
that conflict with what scientists believe is best. But scientists can
be more effective if they avoid using the conspiracy meme and other
rhetorical devices and instead clearly separate their scientific work
from their political advocacy as citizens.

References

Avery, Dylan.
2009. Loose Change
9/11: An American Coup.
Distributed by Microcinema International. Released September 22.

Lahsen, Myanna.
1999. The detection and attribution of conspiracies: The controversy
over Chapter 8. In Paranoias
within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, edited by G. Marcus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
111–36.

Content copyright CSI or the respective copyright holders. Do not redistribute without obtaining permission. Thanks to the ESO for the image of the Helix Nebula, also NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team for the image of NGC 3808B (ARP 87).